Tag: family

with our last company member, Heather Pynne, our lighting designer, having arrived this morning, the POST•M’s company is now all present and participating! Tomorrow is our first encounter as a full company, and I am excited. To see everyone together. To feel everybody’s creative energy all physically connected. To witness in person and in visceral body the meeting of boundaries and their change and development. Finally. It’s taken one year, but here it is, happening.

And it is at moments like these that I feel how lucky I have been so far. I would like to share this feeling with you, and also channel this energy to touch a core theme of POST•M’s: the connection between family history and responsibility. With Alena and Viviane reading Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which I consider a cornerstone of transgenerational digestion of History and personal history, myself continuing my research on scholars discussing transgenerational traumas and elaboration of Memory, the entire company drawing genogram family trees and discussing “group”, “collectivity”, “community” and “society”, we are dealing with the heart of POST•M’s matter.

In other words, how do you consider your family’s past (stories, myths, recollections, corroborated facts, official documents) part of your own past? What is the past? What role does your past play in determining your own present identity, and your own personal choices within your society?

These are the questions I have been asking myself for about 1 year and a half now. These and many more. I do not have universal answers for them. I just have my own answers for my own story – and that might not even be accurate. I believe we need to be aware of this, as much as we should be aware of our bodies. In order to know where we come from, and what sort of interests we will always be inherently defending. To be aware of where we stand means to possibly know which biases might be conducting us, and as such, what biased decisions we can make. Knowing this doesn’t mean not to make those decisions, but to have an inkling – with a historical and social awareness – of the long-term consequences our acts can have. And what sort of future we would like to build for ourselves and the generations to come.

We have the gift of long-term projection, as human beings, and yet we lack, in our everyday behavior, political investing, bureaucratic structure, the driving force to apply it intelligently.

The world is bigger than it feels, or seems. The world is big. And so is time. And so are decisions that travel through that time and space. It can be scary, but most importantly, it is something which as citizens, individuals, communities, we can play with in order to make this world a fairer and more balanced ecosystem.